Daniel Kehlmann & Adam Thirlwell

Kommentar zum Seminar "Kollektive Autorschaft":

"Tentative Experiment to Form a Literary Collective"

The Project of these seminars - TentativeExperiment to Form a Literary Collective - willbe to both analyse and try to establish theconditions for collectivity in literature. Forafter all: collectivity in art and cinema isnormal: like Marcel Duchamp's artworks asinstructions, or Hans-Ulrich Obrist's Do Itproject, or the Dogme group. Whereas inliterature, the collective is more paradoxical.And is maybe, also, impossible. Maybe thecollective reveals the limits of the literary:that is the question of this collectively taught,multilingual series. And so these CollectivitySeminars will analyse the various ways in whichliterature becomes collective: in the groupactivities of the Surrealists and Dadaists; theplagiarism of Lautréamont; the translations ofBaudelaire; adaptations like Fassbinder's BerlinAlexanderplatz; the rewritten screenplay of TheBig Sleep, where Howard Hawks took over fromWilliam Faulkner and Raymond Chandler: yes, viagroup magazines, and editors - the editingprocess of a giant novel, like Moby Dick, or theediting of a short novel like The Great Gatsby;and jointly written journals. But the aim willalso be to try to make the Seminars an experimentin collectivity: which will mean inviting guestsfrom film, literature, and art; as well as thestudents devising a collective experimenttogether - producing a magazine, perhaps, orsetting up a pop-up store, or broadcasting asradio. Or doing all three together. Theseseminars will be a collective way of redesigningthe solitary activity of literature.